© ISTOCK.COM/ERIK VAN HANNENSay you’re heading out of town on vacation. You and your colleagues have been trying to assemble some new genetic constructs, but so far all you’ve got is a set of purified inserts, PCR products, and half-finished plasmids. As you run out the door to catch your flight, you hurriedly place them all in a box in the –20 °C freezer, without logging their location in your notebook.
Your colleagues want to continue the work, but they don’t know where to look for the samples. And you? You’re off the grid, scuba diving in the Turks and Caicos.
It’s a truism of today’s life-science laboratories that their most valuable assets are typically housed either in identical polypropylene Eppendorf tubes in the freezer, or in screw-cap vials under liquid nitrogen. There’s little room to write on those tubes, and adhesive labels can come loose. Even if the labels stick, some people have appalling penmanship. And even the neatest handwriting can only convey so much. How, after all, is anyone to remember, several years and two postdocs later, what is meant by a cryptic string of letters and numbers like SHC1-1? Is that a plasmid ...
